Tina Modotti & Edward Weston

Book excerpt: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston arrived in Mexico in 1923 at the start of an extraordinary period of artistic creativity that became known as the Mexican Renaissance. The book traces the interwoven lives and work of Modotti and Weston from the early 1920's in Los Angeles, where they met, until the 1930's, focusing in detail on their time together in Mexico, where virtually all of Modotti's photographs were taken. In bringing together for the first time close to 150 photographs by Modotti and Weston, it reveals the distinctive responses to Mexico of two photographers from widely different backgrounds. At the same time, like other Modernists in Mexico, these two artists self-consciously created work that broke wholly with the immediate past, and fashioned an idiom in defiance of traditional ideas. A selection of images by two Mexican photographers, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Mariana Yampolsky, reveals how indigenous photography was influenced by these two foreigners.